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“There are No Irish Women Playwrights!”?: A Study on Northern Irish Women Playwrights —Focusing on Anne Devlin's Ourselves Alone

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2014, 27(1), pp.123-154
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yumi Hong 1

1명지대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to draw attention to Irish women playwrights, who have been neglected in the Irish theatre, by focusing on Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone. Anne Devlin, one of the representative Northern Irish women playwrights in contemporary Irish theatre, restores female voices to the stage in Northern Ireland where sectarian conflicts have been prevailing over the feminist issues and where women have been silenced and their voices have not been heard. By representing her three female characters as a trinity of women: the mother, the mistress, and the career woman, Devlin focused on women’s space and women’s voices. This paper explores how Devlin provokes feminist issues in Northern Ireland by examining her three women in the play: Frieda as a woman who is apolitical in an extremely political society and decides to leave Ireland in favor of her aspiration to be a singer; Josie as a woman who is politically involved in nationalist IRA activities and finally abandons violence and terrorism to be a mother expecting a baby, a hybrid mixed with the Irish and British blood; Donna as a wife and mother figure in Northern Ireland, waiting on men. Using the motto of the ‘Sinn Fein’ as the title of the play, Devlin questions who are “ourselves” alone, and shows the female characters as ‘left alone’ without men, letting their voices heard on the center of the stage.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.